I sit under the pear tree with my closest kin, and I ponder a great deal of nothing. I pick up fallen pears and feed them to the small pony grazing nearby. Each of us trades on another’s fading reality. Moment to moment. We only truly exist in that consumption—in a very new sense of the term, eaten alive. For the further we push out from the shores of simple values the more we starve imagination. It was once thought to be counter, but now I hold this much to be true: Imagination is the sex of the world and is only utterly promiscuous in reality. Its purest efficacy. I pick up a popped champagne cork and a rain-wilted rose petal lying on the grass. Put them in my pocket.